No Man Left Behind - The Making of MANWELL

My name is Stuart Fitzgerald and I'm the chair of MANWELL. This post is an attempt to introduce MANWELL to those who perhaps haven't heard of us and to start to explain what we see as our direction of travel over the coming years.

In September 2017, 16 local men came together and booked an artificial football pitch in West Derby, Liverpool with a view to getting back onto the football pitch; getting back in shape; and getting back to their former, more confident selves. Just 20 weeks later, that group of men had grown via word of mouth to 54 and between them they had shed over 380kg of surplus weight. Some lads were travelling over 15 miles to attend.

The weeks running up to our first friendly kickabout was filled with debate about everything from the size of squads; balancing the teams of near-strangers aged between 18-55 years and weighing between 13 and over 31 stone; the ideal shirt colours to be worn by each side of fat men; and whether or not the pitch should be visible to passing members of the general public! This may have been a sign of what was to come!  

Picking up on some of what we perceived to be sensitivities, the group made a firm pact to play football as grown men, in the best of friendly spirits, with our shared goals being paramount – to help each other shed poundage, make new mates and improve the way felt about ourselves.

Within just a week of the first ball being kicked, lads had begun to share open and honest conversations about how they’d grown to their current size. Fellas were chatting tentatively about some of their own life experiences including addictions, anxiety, obesity, abuse, family illness, depression, PTSD, worklessness and general physical & mental ill health. Very soon the talk turned to very serious discussions about coping strategies and how for some fellas, obesity was the cause of other issues; whilst for others, obesity had been an ever-present symptom of greater ills.

Very quickly, a group of us began to discuss what we could do to better understand the range of issues our new mates were facing and how we could work together to help and empower them. Some of us started to share those thoughts more widely, drawing friends, workmates and family into our conversations and feeding back to our “fat footy” group. If you’ll excuse the sheer gluttony of a foody pun, it had become screamingly obvious that there was a massive appetite to do something to change the situation – to create a community of men who were willing to commit themselves to changing ours and their future.

In effect, a movement of men had rapidly evolved beyond the embryonic stage – the MANWELL community had been born!

Now we learned a lot in those first 6 months and through informal group and individual chats, over a range of channels (WhatsApp, SMS, direct messaging, phone calls, over coffees, pints, nights out and breakfast meetings), a vision began to form in our minds of the breadth of support strategies our group might need.

Traditionally the man of the family has been expected to play a role of supporting a family by being the bread-winner, protector and general supporter of the family unit. If family men are strong, the assumption goes, the family unit is strong and thus communities and society in general is strong. But our understanding of those roles have changed over the years and the idea of what it means to "be a man" has evolved. In light of those changing circumstances we'd like to ask whose role is it to support the men of the family; how do we work as a society to keep them strong?

The MANWELL community believes that we need to co-create a solution ourselves. We need to build a support mechanism with solid foundations which is capable of holding up the biggest and strongest of men. Upon those solid foundations, we believe there are 6 supporting pillars which can strengthen the resilience of our group of men.

MANWELL believes that by developing and implementing a series of support, education & information services and activities to sit within the 6 areas shown below we can positively influence the future health and wellbeing of a generation of men and their families:

Keep an eye out for our next post in the coming days which will explore in more detail each of the areas above and explain a bit more of what we've got planned for the future.